Cable cutting and access to foreign TV stations.

Category NoneThose of you with really good memories,
may remember way back in April 2009 I cancelled
my cable TV subscription. My savings have been used to buy various
media players and subscriptions to online service. Honestly never
had any regrets. A few months ago I purchased a Google Chromecast
as it had such favourable reviews in the press. All I can say is
these folks haven't tried the Roku or iPlayer for them to consider it such
a great device. Personally I think it's terrible. I also discovered
that Chromecast hard codes Google DNS as it's look up service. How
do I know this? Because BBC iPlayer stopped working. I used to Witopia
on a router to allow me to access UK shows, but I actually stooped using
that in favour of unblock-us.com
which is actually a DNS service that spoofs your location. The nice
thing about this service, is that it means US providers think you're in
the US, UK providers think you're in the UK etc. and you don't suffer any
performance loss from going through a VPN, so works great. The setup
for unblock-us is basically just switching your router DNS to the unblock-us
DNS servers, so dead easy for most folks.

Anyway, back to Chromecast, I was trying
to use BBC iPlayer with Google Chromecast and had no luck, kept coming
up with an error, iPlayer was working fine with every other device on my
network. It turns out Chromecast has hard coded DNS entries for Googles
DNS servers, thereby bypassing my DNS entries for unblock-us. How
to get around this? wel with my router it supports something called
static routes, and all I had to do was setup a static route for any Google
DNS traffic to go to my router, which in turn will go to the unblock-usunblock-us
service. Et voila, Google Chromecast now works with bbc iPlayer in
the US.